Racing Years World Ranking

The Racing Years World Ranking is the result of our collection of enormous amounts of information from race results throughout the history of motor racing and the application of a computer model developed by us.

The World Ranking is intended to be an at a glance measure of a drivers standing in the history.

The most important thing to understand about how the ratings system works is that it is 100% objective. The algorythm just takes into account the facts.

Sometimes it can be difficult to choose between several options. There are many criteria to consider. No option is perfect. There is no obvious winner.

More races more accurate

Generally, the more races that are raced the more accurate the rankings. We have a limit of a minimum of 85 races for a driver to be ranked. 85 races are like 5-6 championships or years (even more depending of the championship) and that's a large period of time to see if a driver is fast or not.

Quality wins

The algorythm utilizes the huge number of race results stored in our database. Generally, the more a driver wins or finish in top positions, the higher the ranking, so the system takes into account quality final results and strength of the championship.

This is the relative weight (aprox.) of each championship based in our criteria.

Formula 1

Prewar races (European Championship)

Indycar/AAA/USAC/CART

GP2/Formula 3000/European Formula 2

World Series by Renault/Formula Nippon/World Series by Nissan/Rest of Prewar races

World Endurance/World Sport Prototypes

GP3

DTM

European Formula 3/Tasman Series

Non Championship Races & Sports

American Le Mans Series/IMSA/FIA GT/United Sportscar/Blancpain

World/European Touring Car

Indy Lights/Can-Am

Rest of Championships

Driver mistakes hurt the ranking

A driver's ranking is hurt more if the driver has an accident,collision or spin, because all of them count as driver mistakes. The ranking has a problem here because it is not always possible to find out the reasons of all the DNF(Did not finish) but the margin of error in the final ranking is very small, because the abandons for accident,collision or spin have not too weight into the algorythm.

Team mates comparison

The ranking gives more points based in the percentage that the driver is better than his/her team mates. We are only taking the race results for this criteria, because we have not qualifying results of many races and it could give false results in the ranking.

Points system

The driver gets points if he finishes in the first six positions of the race

Other criterias

The final result is divided by the total of finished races of the driver, we don't get into account races where the driver had mechanical problems

Sadly we don't have all the races of all the drivers (mainly in lower formula championships), so the ranking is not 100% accurate.

We have limited the ranking to show only 100 drivers. You can see the ranking position of every driver in their driver's profiles.

Finally, the most important thing, don't take this ranking seriously as the definitive of all times, it only gives us a slight measure of how good are the drivers.